Simbi — Giving students the education they deserve.

A UX design case study

9 min readSep 7, 2018

Reading

For many people the ability to read is taken for granted. People read for pleasure, as a form of escapism or as part of their daily life. For others around the world, reading or literacy is a key element that affects many parts of peoples lives, including their health, happiness and financial prosperity.

Literacy for many is literally a matter of life or death.

Reading — Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The Team

The team to take on the challenge of taking Simbi to the next level are a talented bunch of individuals who were also a pleasure to work with:

Introducing Simbi

Simbi which is short for symbiosis is a peer-to-peer web application that helps children to learn to read through reading while listening (RWL). The peer-to-peer element also lets children record a story so that they can help other children any where in the world to read. The aim is to improve literacy throughout the world.

The Literacy Problem

793 Million adults around the world are illiterate
1 out of 4 of all people cannot read
2 out of 3 of all illiterate people are female
The yearly drain of illiteracy on the global economy is an estimated $1.19 trillion
Illiterate people earn approximately 40% less than their literate peers
Children with literate mothers are 50% more likely to live past the age of 5

The Benefits of Literacy

Less Poverty — If all the children globally learned to read, there would be 171 million fewer people in poverty

2. Lower Early Mortality Rates — Japan, a country with the highest literacy rates (99%) has the lowest infant mortality rate (2 for every 1000 babies born)

3. Stronger Economies — No country has achieved rapid economic growth without a rate of at least 40% adult literacy

4. Community Involvement — Literacy program participants in the United States were more likely than non-participants to register to vote

5. Improved Personal Well-being — In the U.K. 75% of literate people are happy with their lives compared to 50% of illiterate people

Competitor Comparative Analysis

We conducted a Competitor Comparative analysis to understand the main features offered by competing companies.

The key points we looked at were:

A parent & teacher login
Engagement / Gameification
Reach (multiple platforms),
Student growth (testing and progress)

Teach your monster to read and Khan Academy hit all of the targets, but Khan Academy was more relevant because Teach your monster to read is aimed at a younger demographic that is just starting out in recognising letters and words.

By analysing the features offered by the various companies we looked at, we got an idea of what we could include as part of our scope for Simbi.

Simbi’s Unique Value Proposition

“Simbi is humanities power in progressing literacy” — Aaron Friedland — The Walking School Bus

The above inspirational quote from Simbi’s founder Aaron Friedland resonated with all of the members of the group. Simbi was not just helping children to read, but inspiring those same children to help others around the world. Social Impact is Simbi’s UVP. To add to that Simbi was the only company to offer RWL, which as the research shows, RWL is conducive to increased reading development, retention and cognition compared to just reading on its own.

Interestingly, even companies such as Amazon are using the same technology with Audible’s Immersion reading concept:

Experience Immersion Reading — Read and listen simultaneously with real-time highlighting. It’s called Immersion Reading and that’s what it does: immerse you in a story by narrating and highlighting the text as you read. It sparks an extra connection that boosts engagement, comprehension, and retention, taking you deeper into the book — Audible

User Interviews

Supplementary to research data that the client already had, we conducted seven user interviews with teachers of both elementary and high school. It was great to speak to some experienced teachers and to gain some insight into their day to day tasks, goals and frustrations.

What did we learn from the interviews?

You have to make learning engaging for children.
Peer-to-peer learning is a great incentive for children to learn.
Benchmarking or Assessments are important in keeping track of student progress.

User Survey

We posted our survey on facebook, a number of subreddits and also to our own family and friend networks. The survey included screener questions to make sure only teachers conducted the survey. The survey was used to corroborate what we learned from the interviews and from the data that the client provided

Some of the questions we asked were:

How much experience they had
What challenges they faced
How they make reading fun and engaging
How they feel about the assessment process
What kinds of technology they use to teach children to read

Although we only managed to get 15 survey responses, roughly 65% had over 10 years experience and over 85% have taught a student to read.

Most teachers that we surveyed had neutral feelings or liked the assessment process. This was similar to feedback we obtained from our interviews — most teachers saw the assessment process as a necessity in keeping track of student progress.

What they liked and disliked about Assessments

Business Goals

The client stated that he wanted us to:

“redevelop our existing SiMBi web-based application to get the technology into the hands of teachers and students alike”

He also stated that the application has:

“Terrible UI/UX, is only web based, has a clunky backend that requires redesign”

The client also mentioned that a major goal for Simbi was that he wanted to expand the user base of Simbi by targeting teachers and educational institutions, he also wanted Simbi to be implemented in 1000 classrooms in North America by 2019.

This helped us to make the decision to prioritise the teacher flow rather than the student flow.

Feature Prioritisation

The client also wanted a fairly long list of feature requirements, here are some of them:

User Groups — Develop a system whereby SiMBi users can be arbitrarily grouped. Each group has a leader that has admin rights on that group.
Content Collections — Develop a system allowing users the ability to group arbitrary pieces of content into a Collection.
Notifications
Dictionary — Develop a system that will allow specific words in content to be tagged as a Dictionary word.
Quizzes — Develop a system that will allow a Group Leader to build a multiple choice quiz with up to 5 questions ons that will be associated with a particular piece of content.
Gameification — Develop a system to incentivise users using Levels, Points, and Rewards.
Listening — Track how much time students spend reading while listening.
Parent View — Provide parent of each student with toned down version of what the teacher sees for each student.
WCPM (Word Count per Minute) — Building on the WCPM proof-of-concept, develop a system whereby a Group Leader will record a piece of content which will then be assigned to that Group’s members.
Map — Develop an interactive map that enables people and classrooms around the world to create profiles and request and receive content.

We prioritised the list of features as we only had a two and a half week sprint to complete the project. We used our research findings and aligned this with the clients business goals so that our scope wasn’t overwhelming in the short period of time:

As the venn diagram below shows, Simbi has two distinct users — Teachers and students. As mentioned previously, we decided to focus on the teacher flow, but every design decision that we made was made whilst also considering the student user:

User Persona

From our research, we were able to create our user persona — Introducing Lucy Puffington.

Lucy became an educator in order to shape the next generation. She sees the assessment process as a necessity and is constantly thinking of new ways to make learning fun and engaging.

Storyboard

Next we produced a storyboard to demonstrate an ideal user scenario:

Lucy suggests that a student uses the Simbi web app — Illustrations by Satyen Ram

Lucy asks the student to read, the student is struggling to read
The student reflects on his reading struggles
Lucy suggests that the student tries SiMBi
The student is more engaged in reading after using SiMBi
Lucy is very proud when awarding the student the “most improved reader” award
The student is overjoyed with his achievement and wants to help others

Design Studio

Once we had a user persona, we could move on to designing screens using a process known as a design studio. This is a quick way to rapidly prototype screens, after the process is repeated the designs become more refined until the team has come to a consensus.

Site Map

The original site map had separate RWL and recording screens in the navigation. The new site map has combined these screens into one through the library screen. This makes the process of RWL and recording much simpler for both the teacher and student users. These two differing versions were A/B tested by request of the client, with the conclusion that 75% more of testers preferred the redesigned site map.